Groundbreaking for solar power to save Dublin High 40%,
thus reducing teacher furloughs,
financed by municipal bonds,
made possible by cooperation among a wide range of
government officials, private companies, and individuals:
that was the groundbreaking story in Dublin, Laurens County, yesterday,
videod by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE.

Dublin gets the jump on the rest of Georgia again:
Dublin High School will get a megawatt of solar electricity
through a lease agreement with a private company
using local government bonds to get around Georgia’s special financing problem.

Dublin High School of Dublin City Schools will soon implement
1 megawatt of solar energy.

The 4,000 panel solar power plant will be the largest in Central
Georgia and is expected to save the school 40 percent in energy
costs.

Dublin City Schools Superintendent Chuck Ledbetter told 13WMAZ, “The
facility will be built and owned by private business and the school
system will lease the solar power plant, saving us money in energy
costs.”

The original plan was developed more than 15-months ago by German
based MAGE SOLAR, which has a plant located in Laurens County.

Coal is dead. Nuclear is going down.
Solar will eat the lunch of utilities that don’t start generating it.

Can Georgia Power and Southern Company (SO) read that handwriting on the wall?
They can’t fight Moore’s Law, which has steadily brought the cost
of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy down for thirty years now, and
shows no signs of stopping.
This is the same Moore’s Law that has put a computer in your pocket
more powerful than a computer
that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1982
and was used by an entire company.
Solar PV costs dropped 50% last year.
Already all the new U.S. electric capacity installed this September
was solar and wind.
As this trend continues, solar will become so much more cost-effective
than any fossil or nuclear fuel power that nobody will be able to ignore it.

Rogers and Kennedy explained this phenomenon:

The seismic shift in how we all use cell phones and mobile technology to access the internet almost snuck up on the incumbent technologies and the monopolies that made money selling us landline telephones and a crappy service. Now, we’re all using apps on smartphones all of the time. So too, the shift to a scaled, solar-powered future built around the modular technology at the heart of solar power—the photovoltaic solar cell—will come as a surprise to many. We call it the solar ascent, and it is happening every day in a million ways.

Not really about jobs, and not about feeding electricity into the grid:
the new biomass plant near Dublin, GA is about saving that company money on electricity: but at what cost to the state and to local residents?

A new biomass power plant announced Thursday is expected to bring
hundreds of related jobs and a direct $95 million investment.

A statement from the office of Gov. Nathan Deal said the plant
itself will bring 35 permanent jobs to Laurens County.

Compare 35 permanent jobs for $95 million to
MAGE SOLAR’s 350 jobs for $30 million.
That’s about $2,700,000 per job for this deal,
vs. $85,714 per job for MAGE SOLAR.
Which would make MAGE SOLAR’s facility more than 30 times more effective
at producing permanent jobs.

From 2007 to 2011, the unemployment rate in Valdosta increased by
130 percent, from 4 percent of workers to 9.2 percent. The number of
employed workers declined by more than 6,000 during that time. Those
jobs remaining often pay a lower salary. Last year, nearly 17
percent of the work force was employed in the generally low-paying
retail industry, the sixth highest percentage of all metro areas. In
2007, just 11.3 percent of the labor force worked in retail.
Valdosta, however, has an improving and active housing market. Home
prices rose nearly 12 percent between 2007 and 2011. Despite these
positives, 14.4 percent of housing units were vacant last year,
higher than the national vacancy rate of 13.1 percent. Also, 15.3
percent of homes were worth less than $50,000 versus 8.8 percent
nationwide.

The study is actually for “U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, or MSAs”
and this population is not just for Valdosta, it’s for the
Valdosta MSA,
which includes Brooks, Echols, Lanier, and Lowndes Counties.

Dublin has started putting up Solar street lights on South Jefferson near the city's downtown. This project got federal funding from the federal government administered by the Georgia's Department of Transportation.

And grant supported! If anybody around here had applied, maybe we would have gotten such a grant.

Instead, it's another first for Dublin:

"This is the first transportation corridor that has solar lighting in the state of Georgia so it's just very exciting for us, first to have a solar industry in Dublin, now to have the first state roadway lit by solar lighting," said Tim Lake, of T. Lake Environmental Design.

Bragging rights and practical, too:

Lake said the cost of these street lights is about $11,000 and that the standard street lights cost just over $7,600. But the typical street light have other costs like a leasing fee and monthly energy costs that go to the electric company.

He said because the solar street lights are powered by the sun, they will end up saving taxpayers about $500 dollars a month or $15 per street lamp.

"The first is return on investment happens very quickly, 3.7 months for the city to get a return on investment on these lamps," said Lake.

All that plus this:

The solar panels were also made in Dublin by MAGE Solar. Lake said this was a truly collaborative project.

Welcome
Andrea Shuijer Schruijer to a great opportunity as the new Executive
Director of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA)!

For a year I’ve been asking for a list of jobs attracted by the
Authority. We welcome your marketing expertise so we’ll know
the Authority’s successes!

We welcome your communications expertise to inform the community
affected by the process of bringing new jobs. VLCIA could publish
its agendas, minutes, and videos of its meetings, events, and
new jobs on its web pages, and facebook, maybe even twitter.

We welcome your stewardship of the Authority’s $3 million/year in taxes.
Maybe some

Previously
PSC Chair Lauren McDonald said he wanted Georgia Power to
“come up with options in the next 30 days for expanding the tiny amount of electricity generated from solar power”.
Yesterday,
PSC Commissioner Chuck Eaton
said “Solar is great for diversity, independence, research, and business,”
and added that until recently he had discounted solar, but now he had seen it.
And it turns out that Friday
PSC Commissioner Tim Echols
wrote an op-ed saying

It wasn’t until I entered the training room of Mage Solar in Dublin
and saw 40 subcontractors in their solar academy that I got it. The
growing solar industry is not just about funky collectors on a roof or
left-leaning environmentalists who hate fossil fuel. It is about skilled
jobs in manufacturing and construction, about economic development in
Georgia, about consumers saving money on their power bill so they can
spend it somewhere else, and about empowering people to essentially
create their own power plant. This could eventually be big.